The Blog contains 'My Thoughts' about various things in 'My Life' and the world, which may or may not affect my life. The topics posted may vary in domain from the most trivial things/incidents of life to the most important and serious ones.

Saturday, June 3, 2017

I am sitting in a train running at 300 km per hour (186
miles per hour). While the view outside is nice, the train goes through really long
tunnels. So to utilize my tunnel time, here are some of my experiences and
learnings from the GPP trip:

The GPP trip got over two days ago. It was a fun-filled
experience but exhausting at the same time. We visited 8 universities in period
of 8 days, talked to professors, deans, and students at those universities. I found
almost all of them to be very receptive of us. During my visits to the universities,
while I was interested in learning about different facets of the higher
education in Switzerland, France, and Italy, I was particularly interested in
knowing how the universities handle the issue of linguistic diversity. Switzerland
has four national languages – German, French, Italian, and Romansh. In order to
ensure the mobility of students, the universities need to devise some system
through which students who do not speak a particular language in a fluent way
can still attend any university they want to without any language consideration.

However, what I found was very interesting. Universities, generally,
impart instruction in the language that is spoken in the area. For example, in
the Zurich region, the language of instruction is German, while in the Ticino
region, the language of instruction is Italian in the universities. Some of the
course are taught in English as well. In Zurich, one of the professors told me
that the Swiss learn multiple languages while they are growing up. For example,
someone growing up in the German speaking part learns to speak French and vice
versa. Moreover, a lot of people learn English given the global presence of the
language. During my stay in Switzerland, I did not find anyone who I could not
talk to due to language gap. Almost everyone could understand and speak some
level of English. Even while in France, which takes quite a bit of pride in its
language, I did not have many issues when I was once lost in a cafeteria. While
all the servers could not understand me there, they called in someone who
could.

Another aspect that I learned about the Swiss higher education
is its stress on quality. At ETH Zurich, I learned that while all the students
who want to pursue engineering are given admission, after the first year, many
who do not meet the standards are weeded out. This is not to say that students
are not provided with resources to help them succeed during the first year. I
found this to be in quite contrast with the US engineering education where
there is a lot of push to retain students in engineering.

There were many more subtle differences among the education
systems in different European countries that I observed and between European countries’
and the US education systems. Moreover, the way people behaved in general
varied across different countries in Europe and different parts of Switzerland.
Of all the people I met, I loved the most how Italians and Swiss-Italians
conducted themselves. But more on that later as I am about to reach Rome soon! :)